Hello people, hope someone can help me out here. I've got Gothic2 Gold as my first purchase on GOG. The game runs fine with a fluid framerate even at max visual distance and detail. But every few minutes I'm experiencing random freezes, no error messages whatsoever, no crashes to desktop or anything like that, the music keep playing but the scene just locks up, I can't do anything except CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the task manager and terminate the app (also, during this process my mouse doesn't work, I have to navigate with arrows and tab keys).
As for when the game freezes, it just seems to happen randomly, first time it happened as I tried to shoot with a bow near the waterfall (that's 5-7 minutes of gameplay since the start). Second time just as I restarted the game and tried to shoot again. The third time it froze as I was simply walking by the waterpond; then I made my best FUUUUUU face and gave up.
Tried again the next day, and I could do the whole "valley" part without any problems, helped Cavalorn etc. Got another freeze after around 15-20 mins of playing, in the middle of talking with the farmer owner before Khorinis.
I'm really frustrated, this is the second copy of Gothic 2 I bought (the retail version doesn't even start on this pc, something about the DRM I reckon, but I couldn't find a solution for that either).

My system:

Vista 32
Intel Dual Core 1.8GHz
Geforce 8500 GT (with latest drivers)
2gb Ram
Kaspersky 2011 (some posters in another forum were speculating certain antivirus might have compatibility issues with Gothic games, but I couldn't make much sense out of it).

While I haven't had that problem, my guess would be insufficient memory. You are running one (if not the) most memory hogging OS and a game that can (and will) utilize a lot of memory on a computer with only 2gb of RAM. It is possible that the system is trying to increase virtual memory which is a long process.
To see whether that is truly the case, when you next bring up Task Manager, take a look at the processes tab, see how much memory Gothic2 is using, and check on the performance tab how much of your total memory is in use.
If that is truly the case, then I'd suggest you increase your virtual memory (aka swap file) prior to starting the game, or even better, add more memory to your machine (though you will probably need a kernel patch if you increase the memory to 4gb or more).

Thaks for the reply JMich. Strangely, alt+tab doesn't work with Gothic2, nor does the windows key. Ctrl+alt+del as the game is playing properly makes it crash (with some kind of directx error), so I have no means to check the task manager while playing.
But as for a possible lack of memory, I have the same problem with Gothic1 too, wich is far less demanding than G2. Besides, isn't the "Virtual Disk" app wich runs before the game supposed to take care of it?

You should try adding the game's folder or files to Kaspersky's "Trusted Application List" (or whatever they call it now).

I don't recall whether it allows ignoring entire folders; if you have to specify individual files they are gogwrap.exe in the main game folder, and Gothic.exe and Vdfs32e.exe in the game's system subfolder.

In theory this will allow you to play while Kaspersky is running without having to disable it every time.

I am having this same problem and I have 4 gb of RAM, running Windows 7. The game can run fine for hours and then suddenly lock up. Rebooting seems to help. But it's pretty irritating how random it is. I have tried excluding the folder in NOD32 and will see if that makes any difference as well.

After some more (very, very short) testing, it appears that Kaspersky isn't at fault in my case. At least I've had the game freezing even while it was disabled.

On the other hand, it could be that I'm not experiencing a complete lockup, but "just" some pretty extreme waiting time as the game is loading a new area. The last couple of times I just waited for a while to see what would happen, and after almost a minute the action resumed. Unfortunately that was just the moment a wolf was about to land on my poor lvl2 hero, so I had to reload anyway.
Running back to the same spot (just outside Khorinis, near the cave with the orc) I've had another pause of 30 seconds, and then everything was fine again.
This is really weird, I've never had the game stop like this in my old XP pc, wich overall performed the game much more poorly.



Jabbrwokk, maybe your problem is different, but try to just wait for a while and see what happens.

Thanks. I will try that... it just locks up so hard it's bizarre and I am impatient!

same thing here, it doesnt lock up, the fps drops to liek 1 frame every 10-30 seconds. and it seems to be frozen, but i managed (too me liek 10 minutes) to save the game in this state.

Bump.

I have the same problem as OP....